Opening multiple excelworksheets with stringnames from a cell

I have a template file who's name is Template UTT, I load and read the file like this:

excelsheet         = uigetfile('.xlsx','Select a template');
[num,txt,raw]      = xlsread(excelsheet,'main');

In the excel sheet there is some data:

BEGIN_DATA    
GS_L  OECF       DYNAMIC_RANGE
GS_R  OECF       DYNAMIC_RANGE
GS_U  OECF       DYNAMIC_RANGE
GS_D  OECF       DYNAMIC_RANGE
HOR_B  UNIFORMITY  
HOR_W  UNIFORMITY  
HOR_G  UNIFORMITY  
VER_B  UNIFORMITY  
VER_W  UNIFORMITY  
VER_G  UNIFORMITY  
END_DATA

The inputs in the first row between BEGIN_DATA and END_DATA corrosponds to a sheet in the complete excel file, So there are seperate sheets for

GS_L
GS_R
GS_U
GS_D
HOR_B
HOR_W
HOR_G
VER_B
VER_W
VER_G

I want to read each of these sheets induvidually and save data to a variable, or some other way of saving the data so I can read it somewere else in the program.

Now I know I can do this with a for loop and assignin and eval, but I keep reading everywere that this is not the way you should work.

It should look something like this:

[num,txt,raw]      = xlsread(excelsheet,'main');

Where main is the main sheet of the whole file, but I want to read another sheet. I can't make it just read all possible sheets because there are different Templates with different names for the sheets.

Could you maybe help me in the right direction?

Kind regards,

Thomas Koelen

Answer 1

[Titus Edelhofer]

Hi Thomas,

the loop is not bad, but assignin and eval are in this case, that's right. My suggestion would be to do something as follows:

[num,txt,raw] = xlsread(excelsheet, 'main');

% extract from txt your sheet names, e.g.
sheetNames = txt(:,1);

% loop over the sheetNames
for iSheet = 1:length(sheetNames)
  [s_num, s_txt, s_raw] = xlsread(excelsheet, sheetNames{iSheet});
  data.(sheetNames{iSheet}) = s_txt; % or s_num or whatever
end

This way you build up a structure, where the field names are given by the sheetNames. This works, as long as you have GS_L etc being valid variable names. If not, you could use containers.Map instead of a structure.

Titus

[Thomas Koelen]

Thanks again..

I'm fairly new with Matlab and never really worked with a struct, this is the first time actually! This works way better than assignin and eval!

Kind regards

THomas